TRANSITION TO GOVERNING PROJECT EVENT
How Would Bill Bradley Govern?

Tuesday, January 4, 2000

Agenda:

The Transition to Governing Project is an American Enterprise project, in conjunction with the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

More information about the Transition to Governing Project can be found on our website: www.aei.org/governing. Or contact the project at: The American Enterprise Institute 1150 17th St., NW, Washington D.C. 20036. Phone: (202) 828-6038. Fax: (202) 862-5821. Email: governing@aei.org.

[TRANSCRIPT PREPARED FROM A TAPE RECORDING.]

P R O C E E D I N G S

MR. ORNSTEIN: Good Morning. I am Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. Welcome to a series of events sponsored by the Transition to Governing Project, entitled "How Would They Govern?" starting today with "How Would Bill Bradley Govern?"

The next session, just let me note, will be this Thursday, from 10:00 to 12:00 on how would John McCain govern. Panelists will include Senator Chuck Hagel, former Senator Bob Packwood, Helen DeWar of the Washington Post, and several others.

These sessions are part of a broader project looking at the question of governing. We go from a campaign into a governing process, in a way, that has become more and more blurred in an era of what is commonly known as "the permanent campaign."

In this project, we are going to try and bring a focus to governing, and issues of governing during the campaign, to try to create a better transition process from campaigning to governing, that will enable us to improve the climate for governing after the elections.

We are starting today with "How Would Bill Bradley Govern?" We have a very distinguished panel. Four sessions will have very much the same format. We are bringing in people closely associated with the candidate, people who have worked in the capacity of governing with the candidates, reporters who have covered the ability of candidates to govern in the positions they have held before, all moderated by two journalists, who are among the most distinguished we have in the profession. I will introduce the panelists in just a minute. But before I do, let me turn to Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution. And let me also note that the questions most of which will be covered today and in the next sessions are also included in a new issue of the Brookings Review "The State of Governance in America 2000," including a piece by the two of us, which we urge you all to get and read. Tom Mann.

MR. MANN: Thank you very much Norm. Brookings is delighted to join in as a sponsor on this series of events on how the presidential candidates would govern. I want to give my thanks to my colleague E. J., to David Brooks, to our six participants, to Pew for sponsoring the project, to John Fortier for putting it all together, and to Hoover, our third partner in this overall enterprise.

The broader project is designed to try to figure out how to make campaigns conducive to governing rather than antithetical to it. Now there has already been a good deal of very good campaigning and media coverage of the campaign. But our purpose is to try to elevate governing issues in the campaign discussion. Now there has been some already. David Broder’s had a series of interviews with the candidates about how they would deal with governing. But we think this is a tip of the iceberg. We believe, as we argue in a piece on campaign questions for election 2000, that it is not a matter of emphasizing process over substance or to suggest that there are some universal principles of governance that apply equally to all newly-elected presidents. Presidencies are shaped by the personal qualities and policy agendas of presidents as well as by the broader political economic and security contexts in which they operate.

  But variations in strategies of governance are no excuse for an absence of forethought about which strategies are most appropriate and offer some realistic chance of success.

We think these kinds of questions ought to be discussed now, and, fortunately, we have six colleagues who can shed a great deal of light on this.

So we're delighted with the launch of what will be at least four sessions on "How Would They Govern."

Norm, back to you.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Thank you, Tom. Let me introduce our panelists, and talk for just a minute about the format here.

Going from the end of the table, on my left, Marcia Aronoff served as chief of staff to Senator Bradley from 1978 to 1991. Let me note, for those in the room, you have the biographies, so I won't go into as much detail as they deserve, to save time.

Before that, E.J. noted, as the session was just beginning to get underway, Marcia was probably the leading authority on the New York State legislature through her service as a special counselor to two state assembly majority leaders--Stanley Fink and Albert Blumenthal--also has served in public service in the New York City Department of Rent and Housing.

Next, George Miller has represented the 7th District of California in the House of Representatives since 1975, served as chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, and now is the senior Democrat on what has been renamed as the House Resources Committee, is also vice-chairman of the House Democratic Policy Committee and the second-most senior Democrat on the House Education and the Work Force Committee. Congressman Miller, who has been involved in a range of legislative activities, worked particularly with Senator Bradley on water reform in California.

Dave Durenberger served as a United States senator from Minnesota from 1978 through 1994, was a leading expert, continues to be, on health policy in the United States, and worked as a member of the Senate Finance Committee, in particular, on those issues, as well as tax issues with Senator Bradley, is now president of Public Policy Partners, and chairman of the Citizens For Long-Term Care, trying to look at the issues of long-term financing reform in the years ahead.

Let's see. We've got Dan Rostenkowski next. Dan Rostenkowski represented the 5th District in Illinois in the House of Representatives from 1959 through 1994, and of course was one of the most significant and distinguished legislators of the 20th Century, as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and as a member of the leadership, chairman of the Democratic Caucus. He played a central role in every piece of tax legislation, in particular, that occurred during his tenure, but especially tax reform in 1986, in which Senator Bradley also of course had a major role.

Alan Murray is Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, where he has served as a reporter and deputy bureau chief and bureau chief since 1983, also appears regularly on CNBC and Washington Week in Review, and wrote a book on tax reform, "Showdown at Gucci Gulch," which was published in 1987 by Random House.

I might note, just going back, I forgot to mention that Congressman Rostenkowski was the subject of a new and very good biography written by Richard Cohen of National Journal. I'd recommend both of those books to people.

And Jim Goodman has been a reporter at the Trenton Times for 40 years, extending most of his life span, I guess, covering--

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: He started when he was five, apparently.

MR. GOODMAN: Woodrow Wilson.

MR. ORNSTEIN: That's it! And covering politics and the New Jersey State House, but all of New Jersey politics.

The session will be moderated by two distinguished reporters and commentators.

David Brooks, standing right behind me, is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek, and a commentator on National Public Radio. He joined The Standard at its inception, in August of 1995, and before that, served in a variety of positions, including op-ed page editor at The Wall Street Journal.

E.J. Dionne, at the other end of the table, is a columnist for the Washington Post, senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, served as a reporter and editorial writer at The Post, as a reporter for the New York Times, various places around the world, and is the author of a number of publications, but his book, "Why Americans Hate Politics" is viewed as one of the best overall treatments of American politics in recent times.

We will have a discussion among the six, moderated by our two journalists, and let me just note that as Tom suggested, we want to shed light on the process of governing. We want to do it in a lively way, but we want to do more light than heat. Part of what we want to do besides getting a focus on governing is to move the dialogue away from the Crossfire type dialogue towards a more reasoned approach, which we can count on from our two moderators, and I turn it over to them.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you, Norm. One is tempted after saying how this will be so responsible to say Issue One will be--

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: We won't do that. I just want to make a couple quick points about the format.

Abraham Lincoln once defined tact as the ability to describe others as they see themselves, and by that definition, we hope to be tactful every now and again here, because it is important to know how a presidential candidate sees himself, but we also want to be untactful at many points on the theory that we might learn more from how others see him, especially this very distinguished panel.

We also do not want to be pretentious and suggest that only people who pass a certain standard of statesmanship set by others ought to be President. The legendary politician, Thomas B. Reed, once said: "A statesman is a successful politician who is dead."

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: We'll follow Reed and suggest that in the broadest sense, our questions are designed to help voters search for successful politicians who are capable of governing us well while they are alive.

I just want to read two quotations, which I think might set the tone of the discussion. The first--they're both about Senator Bradley. "He is thinking more like a European parliamentarian than an American politician. Those of us who like to do heavy lifting on issues like to work with Bill. He makes a good presidential candidate. He makes a good President." That would be Senator Dave Durenberger, whom I don't think yet has joined Republicans For Bradley, but he might tell us.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: And then from a former aide to Senator Bradley who said, "Is he too cerebral for the job? Is he too academic and slow to make decisions? These are the questions to ask him."

What we hope to do is focus entirely on the question of governing today, and we are going to turn to the audience for your participation. But I very much don't want--and we've talked about this before--we really don't want, say, polemics on the Bradley health plan, one way or the other. That's for heckling in New Hampshire. We hope that when you ask questions, it will focus on the governing question.

We are going to touch on a lot of issues today. At least that's how David and I had planned it when we sat down to talk about it. But we're going to talk about issues in the context of how would the candidates govern, and I thank Norm for his generous introduction of us. I thought--it was so generous, I thought he had scrubbed David and me, and was bringing on Broder and Germond. Thank you.

And I turn to my friend, David Brooks.

MR. BROOKS: Thank you, E.J. It's sort of a weird arrangement with E.J. on either end, with--the Miami Dolphins had a, in the 1980's, a very strong offensive line, and two wide receivers on either end who were very short, who they named the Smurfs.

[Laughter.]

MR. BROOKS: I'm sort of reminded that we're the Smurfs. But we might as well get right into it, and I'd like to start with a question for Ms. Aronoff, and as E.J. said, we're going to get to tax reform and serious issues like that.

But it seemed to me the first issue that pops to most people's minds about Bill Bradley is executive temperament. Known as a loner, a private person.

It seemed fitting to open by asking Ms. Aronoff how he managed his staff in the Senate. Did he have open deliberations? Did he have seminars that the Clintonites were famous for? Or did he make his decisions by himself?

MS. ARONOFF: I think, number one, he looked for staff that had the broadest possible range of experience, and expected staff as well as, as is his own nature, to reach out very broadly to a wide range of people for ideas and views on issues that he was interested in, and I think what is clear from the way Bill has always handled it is that it starts with his defining an agenda that he is committed to, and then looking to build coalitions and to try and get things done. The process of reaching decisions is a kind of interactive and iterative process of working groups of people developing options of his, being directed involved and establishing parameters from the outset, and making decisions as the process goes along.

As he has indicated in the campaign, he tends to get very deeply involved in the key issues that he wants to get done, and I would expect that he would continue that process as President.

MR. DIONNE: We hope that Marcia will explain to us, eventually, if we can learn whom his education or economic advisers are. I'm referring to a New York Times story.

But we'd like to go through the panel, first.

Mr. Goodman, you've written that Senator Bradley is too cautious, too aloof from the political trenches, too wary of striking out boldly. Dull. You have also said that he is an exceptional human being and an admirable person.

Could you talk to us about if Senator Bradley is so popular and such a strong candidate, why are so many New Jersey politicians, including Senator Lautenberg, supporting Senator Gore? Or why are they neutral?

And could you also tell us a bit about his relations with the New Jersey press corps?

MR. GOODMAN: Well, I think the New Jersey politicians, the Democrats, who are saying they're for Gore, lined up for Gore a long time ago, and they are reacting mostly against what Bill Bradley did when he decided not to run for a fourth term, and not only not--did not run, but to say that maybe he was through with politics as we knew it, government was broke. It was an emotional assault on Democrats in New Jersey, the Democrat leaders. He was telling them that they were in the wrong business, almost, and he never, as far as I know, cautioned that he might really go for the Democratic nomination two years later.

He never put out the feelers to the Democrats that, "Let's hold the fire, let's not commit yourself," and by the time he did decide, I guess it was December or January--last December or January, of last year I guess--the last millennium--they're already for Gore.

I think in reading a lot of the commentary and the national press on this, that it's a little misleading. Bill Bradley is still enormously popular in New Jersey. He's enormously popular among New Jersey Democrats. If he's in this race two months from now, you're not going to find a Democrat in New Jersey saying, "Vote for Al Gore," I don't think.

MR. BROOKS: Okay. We'll turn now to Congressman Rostenkowski. Pursuing this theme of Bradley as a cerebral fellow, he gave a speech yesterday in which he said he was going to cleanse the nation, and it was filled with sort of a Tibetan monk quality to it, and I thought I'd read another quotation.

When asked why he's running, here's a quotation from Bill Bradley.

"I think we are good people talking about the American people. There's a goodness in each one of us, that we can see it in our neighbor, and if we can see it in our neighbor, then that allows us to have more connection, and if we have more connection, then we're less fearful and less lonely, and then with less loneliness we can begin to see the whole, and when you see the whole, you see our collective possibilities. So that's the real reason I'm running."

Now I toss out a few questions for you. One, how would Boss Daley react to a politician that talked that way?

[Laughter.]

MR. BROOKS: Second, do you see any resemblance to Jimmy Carter? And third, can someone who speaks in that elevated manner pass legislation in Congress?

MR. ROSTENKOWSKI: Well, I think that Bill Bradley, as I know him, didn't express himself the way you've just quoted him. I think that Bill is a detail person. I can only tell you that my exposure to him, in great measure, was the '86 Tax Act, and I recall one incident--and why I admire him is that he stayed with it. In 1983 and '84, it was Gephardt and Bradley, and then Gephardt faded away but Bradley was still there, and then when we passed in '85, the '86 Act, but we passed it in the House in '85, Bradley was still there.

And I, on one occasion, recall talking with him, because he was in my office quite frequently, and bright as a star. I mean, for a period of time there, I thought he was on my staff, because he was that bright.

[Laughter.]

MR. ROSTENKOWSKI: And I said to him, I said, "Bill, you know, you're so committed to reform and to improving the lot of the lower social level." I said, "I'm having a lot of problems, when I'm marking up the bill, with what I call the 'wethead gang.'"

Those are the young men on my committee that were in the gym all the time, and every time I'd call for a vote, they'd come in with wet heads, because they showered before they came in.

And I said to Bill, "I've got to get these people a little bit more active and involved." And I said, "Why don't you go down to the gym." And he said, "Well, Dan, you know, I--Mr. Chairman, I kind a made a commitment to myself that I wasn't going to play basketball, you know, while I was in the Senate."

And I said, "Bill, you're going down to the gym." And he said, "But, you know, it's difficult for me." I says, "Bill, do you want a bill? Do you really want a bill? Get down to the gym." And he went down to the gym and the "wetheads" started to react favorably to the kind of legislation that we were trying to put together.

I think that Bradley will do what it takes to mold legislation. But I say he's bright. I just hope he's not as detailed as Jimmy Carter was while President, if he gets to be President. I think you have to have a quality in leadership of putting good people together, giving them the authority, the responsibility, and reflecting their positions, and not have the fear of losing their jobs because it's different than yours.

I think that Bill Bradley has that quality, but I think he's got a long road to hoe, tell you the truth, and the Dick Daleys of this era were very close to Bill Bradley. Bill Bradley spent a lot of time Illinois with both Billy Daley, who is now the Secretary of Commerce, and his brother, Richie, who's now the mayor.

The admirable quality about Bill Bradley is he's not afraid of work.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. Let it be recorded "the wethead" is alive and I would also note that when Mr. Rostenkowski said Gephardt faded away, Marcia Aronoff nodded, knowingly.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: Gephardt is supporting Al Gore.

Mr. Miller, with all respect to Tibetan monks, you're not known as one, and many of Senator Bradley's critics say he's too moralistic, that he doesn't deal well with fellow politicians. You're supporting him. You said you have a different experience in that. Could you talk about why you disagree with that assessment, or perhaps you'll surprise us and say, no, you agree with that assessment?

MR. MILLER: Well, my experience is really an in-depth involvement over on a number of different issues, but mainly on the reform of the California water system, the Central Valley project, which is the federal water system in California, and there, what my experience was with Bill Bradley was, one, I think, completely understanding the sense of change, if you will, that the time was ripe, that this was a system that was controlled in every detail by Washington, D.C., in a state that was growing, and the most dynamic in the country, whose economy was changing, dramatically, and that looked like an opportunity for change on some fundamental issues around federal resource policy.

He went to California--unbeknownst to me--went to California, spent a lot of time talking to a cross-section of people--the Central Valley farmers, the Metropolitan Water District, the environment community, the cities, the counties, other people like that, and came back and decided that he was in fact going to participate in a reform of federal water policy.

And like Chairman Rostenkowski's experience, I found the same experience. If you had to get into a foxhole with somebody, this is somebody you wanted to be with 'cause he was not gonna leave, and this is an issue, in California, where governors and United States senators announce that they're going to reform California water policy, then, immediately, they fly into the Central Valley, they start taking campaign contributions from the Central Valley farmers, and then we can't find those governors for four, six, eight, ten years, whatever period of time it is.

Bill Bradley chose another route. He chose a direct challenge to the California people, if you will, and to the California business community, that if this system did not change, a fundamental matter, California's economy was threatened.

Interestingly enough, he fought the California senators on that. This was a constant in-touch strategy, where he had a blueprint at the beginning. He modified the blueprint later. He dropped out major provisions of the bill, taking Senator Johnston's word that things would be restored in conference, came to conference, those items, the most controversial, were restored, between my bill and the House, and the Senate Conference Committee, and it came out kind of as Bill suggested it would.

But it was also a matter of constant contact. I remember, toward the end of the session, where the question was whether the bill was going to pass, of him being on the phone and reading names of people who would benefit or be hurt by this legislation. It's very much like a tax bill. We put together almost every water project imaginable in the Western United States, and then let people sort out some of their self-interest.

And it is a strategy that worked. To the extent that while, again, the old "water bulls," if you will, the "water buffalos" who control most of the political power and the staff to that time, were demanding that this bill not be signed.

In fact by the end of this, the environment community, the cities, the Bank of America, Standard Oil, Transamerica, all of the rest of the people were saying, "You must sign this bill for the good of California's economy."

This started out to be the most contentious issue in the history of California. It always has been, and, interesting enough, sort of at the end, you had someone like Malcolm Wallop saying Bill Bradley knows more about Western water than any other senator, and that's sort of the history of the involvement, which is, on an intellectual preparation, and I think a sense and a pulse of what's going on, the understanding, I think, of how to take advantage of that opportunity, and then this incredible, incredible fortitude to "hang in there" when the incoming fire starts, and it was obviously the largest single reform of federal water policy.

If you think he's too much like Jimmy Carter, if you'll remember, Jimmy Carter sent up the "hit list" of water projects. I was the only one that supported it, and none of those projects came off of that "hit list." I mean, it never happened. That was another approach, which was just to sort of lob your own grenade. That was not Bill Bradley's style.

MR. DIONNE: Can I ask you a follow-up on that? In the National Journal, it was said that the strategy of holding all the other water projects hostage to passing your reform was George Miller--the National Journal describes you as "a cunning politician with a taste for hardball."

MR. MILLER: Great journal.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: And the National Journal tried to get you to say how Bradley responded to that strategy, and they apparently couldn't get you on the phone. So I'd like to ask you: What was Bradley's relationship to this strategy?

MR. MILLER: The strategy was worked out in tandem through the whole process because we knew you had to have a Senate strategy and a House strategy. Again, when you do one of these large bills, you have to keep your eye on both constituencies in the House and the Senate, and, eventually, he knew that my package of reforms would be filibustered in the Senate, so at some point they would have to be dropped out. Before they were dropped out, he would get the assurance of the committee that they would be put back in in the Conference Committee.

I knew that I could attract enough votes, to just the sheer gross number of projects, and the desire to bring something home at election time, that I could pass it with the reforms.

So we started out with the reforms in the House bill, and the other, and, again, I think it's somewhat analogous to what you do in the Tax Bill. You know that certain things are going to work in the House and other things are going to work in the Senate, and what you really need is you need the integrity of some players, so when they give you their word--a lot of people didn't think that Bennett Johnston would keep his word, when he dropped out the reforms. They thought it was a ploy, that the Central Valley farmers--the fact was Bennett Johnston kept his word.

Bill had a better read on that than I did, 'cause I wasn't convinced at that time, and that's how the bill ended up.

he becomes kind of a full partner. a lot of phone messages when he's engaged, so--

MR. BROOKS: Mr. Durenberger, I think you served on two committees with Senator Bradley.

MR. DURENBERGER: Right.

MR. BROOKS: Intelligence and Finance. His critics in the Senate say that when he was uninterested, he became a bit of a loner, a bit disengaged, would send bills up to the floor that didn't have anything close to majority support. I think Senator Pryor once said he saw him filling out notebooks, wasn't quite sure what was the product of the notebooks.

Maybe if you could describe those moments of lack of engagement, or was that problem, maybe you didn't see it at all in the two committees you shared with him.

MR. DURENBERGER: No, I think probably Marcia's already described those. I mean, he would be working on something that he cared deeply about, but that's of the nature of a legislative system such as we have here. When I think about Bill and Al Gore and Orrin Hatch and people like that and I reflect on the comments that my colleagues at this table have already made about Bill Bradley, I'm saying we're pretty lucky in the quality of the candidates we have running for President in this country. And I know this is a session in which we're going to concentrate on the positive rather than the negative. This is a reasoned as opposed to some other effort. But the reality is that the value in the Senate is sorting out the people who really care about issues that are national issues. Even though they may have a largely local impact, George Miller, Bill Bradley, and others who were involved in that bill that you just described are, to a degree, setting some national water resource policy, because what went on in California, some part of that is likely to be repeated when the same kinds of issues come up in my State of Minnesota or somewhere else.

The value of a Senate background for those who are the thoughtful, those who are the principled, those who have integrity, as reflected from the wise old bulls who can see folks come and go, is that you gain a national perspective on a variety of issues which may seem to others to be localized in nature, but over time they become national issues.

George could talk to us during the course of the morning also about the direct student loan program, which I called on my side the Independent Education Act, or something like that. But, again, a principled--a principled effort to try to get people to look differently at the role that government and public policy would play in what people see as a localized responsibility, elementary and secondary and higher education.

So I found that in Bill, I found that in Al Gore, I found that in a variety of my colleagues. On the other side, the people that you might call the less thoughtful are into everything because they don't know which ones are going to count when they get to this--when they get to that stage of the electoral process. So they are into everything and they have to vote right every time a vote comes up on something like that.

So it really is important, thinking about the future and thinking about the role that a President plays in the governance, to determine for yourself over a long period of time--in this case, 18 years--did this particular person bring a national dimension to all of the issues in which he was faced?

And I suppose during the course of the morning I can talk more specifically about some of the intelligence issues that can be talked about. But the reality is that we served together, when I was Chair, at least, in one of the toughest times for congressional oversight, 1985-1986. And I found of all of the people that I served with, including some who are in high positions today, I found Bill Bradley to be the most reliable, security-conscious, policy-conscious, conscious of the role of the President, conscious of the role of the executive and the role of the legislature in dealing with a very delicate subject, like intelligence.

So I was happy, I guess, that--and maybe to a degree I operated the same way--that he wasn't into everything. I wouldn't call him--I've never characterized him as a loner. These are style issues. These are just the ways certain people operate, and in a collegial body, you may expect more back-slapping, wet hair, pull out a basketball even though you've, you know, forsworn basketball as your--as your forte. But the reality is--the reality is different.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you.

I want to bring in Alan Murray to talk about tax reform, and then from here on in, we will have had everyone speak. David and I hope you could feel free to just jump on each other's comments, positively or in disagreement.

Alan, you have a very helpful perspective here because you covered tax reform as closely as anyone, and now you're the bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal looking at this presidential campaign. Could you talk about what you learned from tax reform and how that shapes the way you're looking at Bradley as a candidate, both strengths and weaknesses, from your close study of that experience?

MR. MURRAY: Well, first of all, I should say I'm sitting here flanked by people who were inside the room and I was outside the room.

MR. DIONNE: That never stops us.

MR. MURRAY: It doesn't--it's not going to stop me at all, E.J., but I just thought I should say it before I start.

Congressman Miller and Marcia Aronoff may disagree with this. I think if you ask anyone who has been in this town for the last 20 years to start ticking off names of great or effective legislators, I think you would have to go a long, long way before Bill Bradley would pop onto that list. You know, it's--in terms of sort of the basic daily tactics of horse trading, log rolling, coalition building, names like George Miller, Chairman Rostenkowski, Bob Dole, Bobby Byrd, Ted Kennedy, the people who we think of as great and effective legislators, even during tax reform, that's not the way I certainly thought of Senator Bradley.

And, in fact, it's important to keep in--to sort of remember that from the very beginning, in a perverse and ironic kind of way, the legislative process of tax reform began in part because Senator Bradley failed completely to sell his own party on the plan.

In 1983, he was desperately trying to get to the Mondale camp, which was preparing its campaign, thought that the Bradley-Gephardt bill would be a good platform for Mondale. He arranged a meeting with Jim Johnson, the campaign chairman, who failed to show up for the meeting. He had a terrible time getting through to Mondale. Mondale wasn't interested. Mondale didn't like tax reform. He didn't understand tax reform. He didn't want to do it.

But in the Reagan White House, they somehow got it into their mind that Mondale was going to do this, and that was how the whole thing started. They went to Don Regan, the Secretary of the Treasury, and arranged--and it was at the State of the Union address in 1984 when President Reagan said: I want you to come up with a tax reform plan and report back to me in December, at the end of the year. That was how the whole thing started. It was because they were desperately afraid, incorrectly, that Bradley was going to sell his plan to Mondale.

But having said that, look at what Bradley did. I mean, first of all, vision. This is not a plan that somebody handed to him. He understood that there was a historic opportunity to pull together what the Republicans wanted at that time, which was lower tax rates, and what Democrats had traditionally been interested in, which was equity and fairness. There was a unique opportunity. He saw it. He saw it almost alone. And then the second thing is hard work, which has already been referred to. Marcia knows this better than I do, but he, for the better part of a year, he did have seminars in his office with--Gina Despres pulled these people together, Jim Wetzler, Randy Weiss, a couple of lawyers from Caplin & Drysdale, and they sat down and they worked out the details of his plan in his office.

Perseverance--Chairman Rostenkowski has already referred to that. I would challenge Senator Durenberger whether there has ever been any Senator who worked a bill in the House of Representatives the way Bill Bradley worked tax reform, and again, it was sort of making himself available to go play basketball when the Chairman asked him to play basketball. I think he spoke to your colleagues the night before the markup began. He met with every Democrat on the committee. He met with all the leadership. They sort of just arranged--whenever he was called on to go meet with somebody, he did.

It was interesting to me to hear Chairman Rostenkowski refer to him as almost like being a member of the staff, because I bet if Senator Packwood were here, he would describe the process in the Senate in a similar way.

Bradley wasn't out there moving the bill, doing the day-to-day work of legislation. He was advising the people who were doing that. He almost an adviser, advising them on the substance of the bill and on key parts of the strategy.

One of the interesting things that Senator Packwood did in the Senate was to put the bill out there and say no amendments will be allowed whatsoever. Well, that was Senator Bradley's idea. It was a strategic notion that he had that helped the bill survive the Senate.

And I guess the last thing I would say, because you end up with all these comparisons to Jimmy Carter, whether he's too cerebral, whether he can't cut the deals that have to be cut, the bill came close to falling apart dozens of times. The last time it almost fell apart was in conference as they real--as the rate kept--the top rate kept creeping up because they needed more revenue to keep the thing together. And it was Senator Bradley who proposed the final sleight of hand. It was a gimmick, really. The bubble. It was Senator Bradley who said, hey, we can do this, we can give you a higher rate without saying we're giving you a higher rate. It was pure legislative gimmickry, and it came from Senator Bradley.

So one of the great legislators of our times? No. But a lot of people have questions about whether great legislators make great Presidents. Bill Bradley certainly showed the vision, the hard work, the perseverance, and the skills that were critical in helping make the thing happen.

MR. BROOKS: But what was the primary resistance, say, in the Democratic Party to start with? Was it the resistance to higher rates? And Senator Bradley--how did he rebut that? Or maybe it was Mr. Rostenkowski who did it.

MR. MURRAY: Well, it sort of depends on who you're talking to. There were different types of resistance, and in some ways Walter Mondale encompassed all of them. Walter Mondale wasn't particularly interested in lowering rates. He was raising money left and right from people who would have gotten slammed by the bill and who--in fact, in May of 1983, he actually made some favorable comments about Bradley-Gephardt and was flooded with phone calls from real estate developers and other people who said: What are you talking about? You can't do this.

So you had a combination of things that caused Democratic resistance to the bill. But there was plenty of Republican resistance as well. I mean, I think even though he put his name on a tax reform bill, I don't think Congressman Kemp ever understood the compromise the way Bill Bradley did. Congressman Kemp saw it as a Trojan horse to get more tax cuts through. He was never really interested in eliminating loopholes, eliminating special interest loopholes. And, in fact, his bill did precious little of that. And once they started doing more of that, he jumped off. He almost killed the bill in the House of Representatives by withdrawing his support.

MR. BROOKS: This may be for Mr. Rostenkowski. How tough was the Gucci crowd's opposition? Were there moments when you thought that you would lose? Were there moments, dark nights of the soul, where you and Senator Bradley got together? And then following up on that, one of the paradoxes is that Senator Bradley was an extraordinarily good fund-raiser in the next four years. I think he raised more than every Senator but Senator Gramm, I think. And if he had offended the Gucci Gulch, how was he so successful then to--

MR. ROSTENKOWSKI: Well, I'd like to comment a little on what Alan said about the road to the '86 tax bill.

You must remember that Fritz Mondale, when he got the nomination, suggested he was going to raise taxes. He said that on television. As a matter of fact--

MR. BROOKS: You were there.

MR. ROSTENKOWSKI: I was standing right alongside of him.

[Laughter.]

MR. ROSTENKOWSKI: And I said: Are you crazy? He says: No, I'm going to tell the truth. That's exactly what he said.

Now we went into the election, and Don Regan and Jim Baker and Ronald Reagan were putting together this tax package called Treasury I. Well, they never really had to use it. They never really had to use it. And so they get elected, and Don Regan's got Treasury I, and after the election, they announce that they're going to talk about tax reform because the President referred to it.

I never acquired so many friends in my life as I did when I held a meeting in Chicago with all the business community and they were ready to slit their wrists about Treasury I.

I came back to the Capitol and told Tip: Let's just grab this thing, let's just take it. But like liberals, it wasn't enough.

I said to Tip O'Neill: Tip, if we introduce this legislation, we couldn't pass it. If we introduced it. But it's the Reagan policy.

Well, then there was a modification of Treasury I to Treasury II. Then there was the transition, and only in the Republican Party can a Secretary of a department go to be the Secretary to the President and have it look like it's a promotion.

[Laughter.]

MR. ROSTENKOWSKI: Don Regan left the Secretary of the Treasury and went over to work for President Reagan, and Jim Baker took over the Treasury.

Jim Baker than came in January and February to my office and sat on my couch and said: We're going to do this--and Darman was there. We're going to do this, we're going to do this. And I'll never forget. Rob Leonard was sitting opposite me and Joe Dolly (ph), and I looked at them and I said: Jim, you're talking about your document as though it's the conference report. I said: I'm going to take three months of hearings on this. I'm going to let everybody talk about what we should be doing in tax reform.

Well, we continued to argue about what we were doing. Now, that was January. And in August we passed the '85 tax bill from the House. And I couldn't find a real estate person in my life to help me with the bill. But when Packwood got through with his bill in the Senate, the real estate people were my best friends.

[Laughter.]

MR. ROSTENKOWSKI: But Bill Bradley, as I said earlier, was consistent. He was committed. And I'll never forget--and this is one issue that I think helped motivate the members of my committee to recognize that we're going to get--I'm going to get a bill.

There was an amendment introduced about the second week of our markup, and it was bad debt reserves. And I looked at Rob Leonard, and I said: What do we lose with this? He said: Eight billion dollars. And I said: Holy Jesus. And two of my colleagues on the Democratic side promoted this and beat me. And they realized after lunch what they had done and how we were going to be depicted as killed the tax bill that Reagan wanted.

The two gentlemen came into my office and said: We'll change our vote. We voted on the prevailing side; we'll change our vote. I said: Uh-uh. And I remember Rob Leonard saying: Boss, boss, we got to do this. I said: Rob, we're going to go over the weekend and let the SOBs suffer, because the press is going to kill 'em.

Well, I put John Sherman to work on the press corps, and they analyzed what the bill--what this did, and over that weekend I got a hundred calls from members that even voted with me: We got to do something about this.

That was the--but Bill Bradley was the one kid that came over--the one young man that came over to see me and says: Mr. Chairman, don't. I said: Bill, don't worry about it. It's going to work out. It'll work out.

Well, the following Tuesday I reconvened the committee, and it was from that point on that we started to move the bill.

You know, Alan, that bill in the House had more wakes than any bill ever, but it never had a funeral. And that's when we send it over to the Senate, and I got a commitment from [inaudible]. We send it over to the Senate. Bob Dole called me: What did you do to me? Actually, it was Bill Bradley on the Senate side that was constantly giving me the information about where the members were coming from and what was happening in the Senate.

But I appreciated in the five and six months while we were working it in the House that Bradley was always in there trying to give us an idea about what we could be doing or what we should be doing. And he was a numbers cruncher. He could crunch numbers. He was good at it. At the same token, we felt that we weren't going to see the light of day on the Senate side. As a matter of fact, what we really wanted to do is just push it over to the Senate, and we constantly had the President get involved. And Jim Baker was always down field blocking for Ronald Reagan. I said: Uh-uh, the President's got to say this, the President's got to say this.

MR. DIONNE: Could I turn--I want to say that Mr. Rostenkowski was a member of the House of Representatives, but he is an incredibly entertaining filibusterer.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: Thank you for that.

MR. BROOKS: I was thinking, the New York Times had a story the other day saying that you'd gone soft. Another inaccuracy.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: I also want to note that the language--

[Simultaneous conversation.]

MR. DIONNE: The language he used to Walter Mondale, according to Alan Murray's book, is even more colorful than he recounted to us today.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: Could I turn to Marcia on this subject? We hear Bradley here praised as the candidate who had the guts to come up with the gimmick that passed tax reform, which is not exactly consistent with the theme of the campaign as he's running. Yet we also hear a lot of questions that Bradley is incapable of legislating.

I wanted to ask you if you could talk about water and the tax bill, that these are used as examples of how Bradley can be a real politician. They are also two of the only examples that come up from his legislative career. So how are we to judge these things: that he can be a real politician and get things done, or that this is an unusual thing for Bill Bradley to do?

MS. ARONOFF: Well, Bill passed a considerable amount of legislation in the Senate. I think what it shows and--and which I think is characteristic of him--is that, number one, he is relentless and tenacious. When he is committed to doing something, he will stick with it until it gets done;

Number two, that he likes to deal with fundamental issues that he considers to be intrinsically important and puts energy into them;

Number three, that there are some principles that guide him in much of what he does. Fairness I think is one of them in both of these two examples. And two issues where he felt that there both a very important economic issue, as there was in the case of both water and in the case of taxes, and an issue of fundamental fairness. I don't know another word to use for it.

I think he is effective at team building. His entire career has been built around working with people, and in being willing to play a non-visible role in order to get things done. He's not looking--and--and most--a lot of what he has done, he's been quite content to try and help others get things done in their own name if it means getting something done. He is interested in making things happen.

It is said from his prior career that he moved well without the ball, and I think that that is characteristic of him.

He also has his own sense of timing, which defies generally people's accepted wisdom about what one can do and what one can't do and when it's an appropriate time to be able to get things done. Nobody felt that this was a logical time to run for President. I think he is defying conventional wisdom again. But I think he's been willing to do that in his prior career.

MR.DIONNE: Mr. Durenberger, Mr. Miller--and a Pulitzer Prize for the reporter who discovers the non-visible role and makes it visible to us. That's a great term.

MR. DURENBERGER: Yeah, and this may be a question of Marcia. But one of the things I suppose we're looking for as we're thinking about governance is effectiveness. And I guess I've been quoted a couple times as having this memory of Bill Bradley going to the floor in the name of--I think you call it fairness, and I would agree with you there--with an amendment that wasn't going to get more than three votes, and I'm thinking particularly in the energy and--energy conservation, some of those areas. He'd walk out there and do something that at least half of us thought ought to get done but it wasn't the right time or place to do it, but it was the only place and it was probably the only time that year he was going to get--get a crack at it. So he'd go out and do it.

And we'd sit there and say, "Oh, my God, why does he have to do it now?" and you've end up going down and voting against your friend on an issue you probably cared about, but it just wasn't appropriate timing. I've often wondered if that was stylistic, or if that was the real Bill Bradley, and he just felt compelled to go make a statement on an issue which some would interpret, over time, as the mark of someone who might not always be very effective because he loses 97 to three. How do you--

MS. ARONOFF: I think that from his standpoint, he would say that you have to start making your case some place, and that the way you build public support for something is to try and bring it to public light, and that if you wait until you've got all of the votes rounded up in order to start making the case, and start building it, you'll never start.

That's why I think when he first did tax reform, nobody felt it could get done. It was an effort to try and make things happen. The same thing I would say with Third World debt, which had absolutely zero legislative hook to it, but was something that he felt was important to deal with, and started speaking about it everywhere, until he got an administration to respond to it--the monetary policy. A lot of issues that he became involved with. I think he viewed the role of senator as not just passing legislation but making things happen, and in affecting policy, and I think that he will view the role of President as well as one in which you have an enormous opportunity to make things happen, that may or may not be enacting legislation, or may or may not be a Government policy. It may be mobilizing the civic sector which has as much to do with people's lives as Government.

MR. BROOKS: Why don't--sorry--I didn't mean to interrupt. Why don't we go to Congressman Miller, and then Jim Goodman has been writing, furiously. I think he's got three columns done.

MR. MILLER: I was just going to say, in terms of--this discussion is about governance, and if you sort of look at some of the comments that emerge out of this discussion in terms of, the fortitude to stick with the battle, raising issues early, in some cases, that perhaps the rest of the legislature didn't see--it's interesting, if you go back and sort of read the year-end summaries of what happened during the year, you'll see, very often, referrals to Senator Bradley raising an issue on the floor, losing that issue on the floor, and that issue coming back and getting accepted in some new reiteration of what he was earlier suggesting.

But I think also the question in the Water Reform Act, one of the real key issues here, that was unspoken, in a way, was really about whether or not more entities were going to get a seat at the table, if you will, where these decisions were made.

Was it just going to be the Bureau of Reclamation, and the big growers, or was it going to be the cities and the counties, and the environment community, and the fishermen, and the commercial fishermen and the sports fishermen? Were other people going to get to participate in this democratic process?

I think when you went to the White House and you signed the '86 Act, at that time, people felt that that was about as fair as the Tax Code had ever been, with the lowest rates we'd seen in an awful long time, and people had a sense that this was more on the level.

I think those are governance skills that people, I think, want to believe that the President has. We've seen variations of these, where they've been taken to an extreme, and too much tinkering, or involved in too many issues, and you kind of end up with nothing.

So I think these are very interesting comments.

Finally, let me just say this. You know, in the invisible role--I think it was Cazzie Russell who used to say that Bill Bradley would stay up late at night drawing very intricate plays, and that people would say, "Well, that won't work, the team's not up to this, it's not up to that." And then the next night, that play would work. And somehow, between late night and game time, the team believed that that play could be done.

And I think here what you see is a martialing of resources, and banking either on people's words, or banking on a vote. There are a lot of instruments--and, you know, Chairman Rostenkowski can tell--but there's a lot of leverage you can pull in the legislative process, and one of the skills is knowing about how to do that.

You know, we live with the legend of Lyndon Johnson. He could do more on the phone than most Presidents could do in person, all day long, and there are those different levers.

I think what's emerging here is in fact that role, visible, invisible, but somehow the result. You have to look at the results here on a whole range of issues in terms of Medicaid changes for women and for children, and the direct student loan, and protection of the Grand Canyon. The Stirling [ph] Forest, where people thought he was nuts because he failed to protect his own forests in New Jersey, and came right back and got better protection because he understood the dynamics of the Senate and those kinds of issues.

MR DIONNE: I'm taking bets on whether we see Cazzie Russell in a Bradley commercial before the campaign is over.

I'd like to turn to Mr. Goodman, and as you say what you want to say, I'd also love you to talk about how all this played back in New Jersey, and before we leave tax reform, I'd like us to come back to Alan and Chairman Rostenkowski.

Please.

MR. GOODMAN: I think--let me be devil's advocate--that most of what's being said at this table is exactly what Bill Bradley's problem is as a candidate, and if he were elected as President.

He doesn't communicate to people on things they really care about. I don't know anybody--I've never met anybody who thanked Bill Bradley for the 1986 tax reform, except the people at this table.

I don't know anybody who--maybe in California but not in the Northeast, that thinks California water legislation that he passed was important to them.

MR. MILLER: That's 30 million people.

MR. GOODMAN: But these are what--we're talking about a nonvisible role, that you seem to think is good for somebody who's running for President, or maybe as President. I think what Bill lacks is the ability to seize a command of an issue, or of a program that means something to a lot of people. I think he's trying to do that now with health care but what have we gotten so far? Most of his health care program sounds like what you guys are talking about behind the closed doors in the House or the Senate.

I mean, Bill Bradley's got a long way to go, to show that he's a real presidential candidate, and in that process, if he is, then we'll see whether he can be President, how he will govern. I don't think we know, from this kind of interior Beltway operations, which I'm not an anti-Bill Bradley guy, I gotta tell ya--but I think he really does have a problem getting out of a narrow area of--a good personality, people are confident that he's honest, but they really don't know what he would do with that honesty, with that sort of real concerns for real people.

MR. BROOKS: E.J. mentioned getting back to tax reform. I have two questions I might as well throw out to Alan Murray.

The first is to reiterate the question of the fund-raising. How was he such a good fund-raiser, and remains a good fund-raiser, because I think it talks to his ability to sort of not burn bridges?

The second concerns the tax reform since then. Both the Bush and Clinton tax bills have open loopholes, raised rates, and Bradley has supported those.

Can you describe, or do you have any sense of what his thinking was in undoing some of what was achieved in '86?

MR. MURRAY: David, let me amend one thing I said earlier. I made the mistake of talking about the people who sat around the table with Bill Bradley, drawing up this tax plan. I made the mistake of throwing out some names, and I failed to throw out one very important name, and then I looked up and saw that person standing in the back of the room, and that was Joe Minarek, who was one of the key architects.

He has since stomped out in disgust, but if somebody sees him afterwards, would you tell him that I amended my list.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: This is called "not burning bridges."

MR. MURRAY: Yeah; right.

I find the fund-raising piece of this fascinating. I mean, you can certainly find plenty of times when Bill Bradley helped particular interests in the Senate Finance Committee. Pharmaceutical companies are a great example of that. They have been and still are heavy contributors to him. But as you point out, in the course of tax reform, he also stuck it to a lot of interests, and I was particularly interested in how, early last year, when no one thought Bill Bradley had a chance of winning the Democratic nomination, he was able to raise the huge amounts of money that he did raise from folks in Silicon Valley and from folks on Wall Street, and from financial interests in Chicago.

I mean, the numbers were astounding for somebody who was rated as much of a long shot as he was rated at that time, and I think what it tells you is that fund-raising is a much more complex phenomena than we in the press sometimes view it as, and I think he has a way of speaking to intelligent people, at that level, that they find very attractive, and very appealing, and particularly in those smaller groups, and that they hear him and they say, "I like this guy, I think he's smart, I like the way he deals with problems, and I want to give him money."

You know, I don't think you can discount the amount of that sort of giving. After all, you're talking about a thousand dollars a pop here.

I don't think you can discount sort of that amount of giving that goes on. That's not to say that campaign fund-raising is a good thing, or there isn't a lot of--

MR. GOODMAN: That is the reason why he was able to raise money so successfully in New Jersey. He never really had to beg for it. He just would hold fund-raisers early, and he would say, "Thank you, I want to thank you people for contributing to me now, five years before my next election, so I don't have to beg for it in my last--

MR. MURRAY: He appeals to intelligent--

MR. GOODMAN: There's no question about--

MR BROOKS: Let's go to the issue of just--the more governance-related issue of what he thinks of low rates, no loopholes and why he seems to have gone back on--

MR. MURRAY: Well, he's--you know, there has been a lot of backsliding since then. Taxes get to be a very complicated subject. On the other hand, he's giving a speech today--my understanding is he's giving a speech--and Marcia may know more about this than I do--in which he's going back to some of those themes of tax reform, and calling for closing some corporate tax loopholes, and cutting down on corporate tax shelters, which were the hallmark of the '86 bill.

So I don't think he's really moved away from it--it was a tradeoff. The '86 Tax Bill wasn't some sort of pure flat tax notion. It was a political tradeoff. You can give the Republicans what they want--lower rates--by giving the Democrats something they want, which is getting rid of a bunch of these special interest loopholes that have the stench of inequity and unfairness about them. Let me just say one thing, very quickly, because I think it ties together some of what we've been talking about, and Marcia can correct me, if I'm wrong on this.

I think the Bradley proposal in '82 really grew out of his frustration in '81, which was one of those times when he did exactly what we've just been talking about. He was the only member of the Senate Finance Committee to vote against the Reagan tax cuts, at a time when everybody, from both parties, Chairman Rostenkowski had thrown in the towel, said we can't fight this, it's too popular, we're jumping on board. He was the only member of the Senate Finance Committee to vote against it, and then he stood in the Senate and proposed amendment after amendment after amendment after amendment, which got defeated, each of which got defeated by overwhelming votes.

And it was a stand of principle, and it was, I think, in sort of the introspection afterwards, and saying, well, this isn't very effective, that led him to tax reform.

MR. DIONNE: Before we turn from this, I'd love Chairman Rostenkowski to take a crack at, especially at the question of Bradley as politician, but also some of the issues that Alan raised.

MR. ROSTENKOWSKI: Well, Bradley, at least the Bradley I knew, was never adverse to fund-raising. He was all over the country raising money for various people, because there was always the threat, or the possibility that he was going to be a candidate for the presidency.

I mean, I couldn't go any place in Chicago or Bill Bradley was there, and people wouldn't say, "He's going to run for President, isn't he?" The question is, when did Bradley make up his mind to run for President? And I think a lot of people did exactly what Mr. Goodman said, they tied him to Gore, because Bradley was not committed to run.

I think, too, that when you talk about standing up for something, and that's really not popular, Bill Bradley just made the statement a couple a weeks ago--he raised too much money. I think that that's almost an evil--I just have too much money, I don't believe in all this money.

Well, you know, you've got to live in the real world. You're going to be on television. You're going to have to raise money. I don't appreciate that, and I think we ought to do something very seriously about that, even a constitutional amendment. But I think that Bradley as President would have a tough time bending to negotiate deals. And that's what it's all about.

The ironic thing in the '86 Act was that we had Ronald Reagan, and this solid wall of resistance on the Republican Party crumbled because Reagan was so popular.

And, boy, if anybody got shellacked in the '81 Act by Ronald Reagan, it was Rostenkowski. I was being considered the person that was raising the ante all the time. I wanted to close the door, but Reagan--give more away, give more away, and it was one of his financial advisors--Walker--that said deplete the Treasury, don't leave the liberals have any money, don't let them have any money. They can't spend what they haven't got.

Well, the debt sure went up because of that. At the same token, I think that Bill Bradley is probably one of the brightest candidates, and I, as a Washington ex-insider, I appreciate the dialogue that's taken place in the campaign, because it's realistic as opposed to, you know, Did you take drugs? I mean, this is silly. But I think that Gore and Bradley are bringing something to the debate that's very worthwhile to the American people.

MR. BROOKS: Before we get on to specific policy areas like health care and education, and foreign affairs, there's one problem I still have trouble getting my mind around, and when we hear about Bill Bradley is a great numbers cruncher, a visionary, I still have trouble seeing him in the role as President, in that Queen Bee role, surrounded by office buildings full of aides, surrounded by people all day and all night, surrounded--having your days programmed minute by minute. Maybe Ms. Aronoff can really speak to that.

Does he run his life like that yet? Do you see him surrounded by, really, thousands of people, programming him that way?

MS. ARONOFF: Well, for one thing, I think that you will see a somewhat different kind of a presidency in Bill, that you would see from a lot of different people. I mean, I think, again, that he sees the role as being very much one of getting things done, and involving a very broad segment of the population in doing so.

Sure, I mean, I think he is--his campaign, he's not, you know, running his campaign and makes no pretense to be able to do so. We've got organizations in all of the key, early primary states, and is used to relying on people to get things done.

I think he sees himself as setting priorities, setting a tone, setting direction, giving people a clear path for what he wants to get done, and relying on people to get it done. He's certainly not a micro manager, but I think you will see him heavily involved in the key things that he thinks are important to get done, to make sure that they are done, and I think that that's basically, at least from my own personal standpoint, what you want in a President is someone who can set direction, can lay out some of the fundamental things that they want to see done, and make sure they happen.

MR. DIONNE: Alan Murray. Then I want to ask Senator Durenberger a question, and I have a couple of people who want to get in the discussion, Norm Ornstein, when we get around to foreign policy, and also John Anderson, and as we go, if people want to get in, if you could put up your hands, I'll try to make a note, and David will try to make a note from that end.

Alan.

MR. MURRAY: E.J., I want to make a really quick comment about what Marcia just said, and ask you, if I can turn the tables, because I think you may have a better sense of this than I do. But my sense, from reporters covering the campaign, is that he is incredibly involved in his own campaign, and much to the frustration of the reporters covering it, that there is not the same sense of structure and organization, and you know to go to this person for this and that person for that, that there is in the other campaigns.

I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. I think it's a somewhat frustrating thing to reporters covering it. Do you share that sense, E.J.?

MR. DIONNE: Well, that Bradley is too--

MR. MURRAY: That Bradley is very much involved in the day to day operation of his own campaign, to the point that it's sometimes hard to understand exactly who you go to to get certain things done, and that it has a free-wheeling feelto it, that can be very frustrating.

MR. DIONNE: I don't know--my sense, it was fairly freewheeling at the beginning, but with a kind of core strategy, and then, now, I find there are a couple of people you can go to to learn certain things. I should say I used to learn from Marcia when she was running the state legislature.

But I do think that that raises a question about sort of the Bradley style, and it goes to David's Queen Bee question. I want to flip it back to John.

MR. GOODMAN: How many people can he trust? That's the thing. He always had a very small group of people around him. Can he, as a President, trust as many people--place his trust in as many people as needed to run the country?

That is the real question I would have about Bill as President.

MR. DIONNE: And there is in these clippings I read a line saying he--"Bill likes virgins," said an aide, and this was a reference to aides who had not had political experience, I should say quickly. We're not lowering the tone here. That he liked people who kind a came to him first, you know, and were not sort of tarnished by the political system.

MS. ARONOFF: I don't know that I would use the term "not tarnished by the political system." We've always had people who've had political experience. I think what he's wanted is people who've had a breadth of experience, so that they are not only seeing things through the perspective of never having worked anyplace else but Government, so that when it came to understanding how a businessman viewed the world, or how a citizen's group, what role they could and might play in the solution to a problem, that you didn't have somebody who felt that the first and only answer was a Government program to every problem.

I mean, I think that's healthy. I think that the world is made up of a lot of different sectors, and so trying to get people who have a breadth of experience, including political experience, is an appropriate way to try and approach policy.

MR. DIONNE: I want to ask Senator Durenberger, I want to sort of get us into health care, we've got to move to foreign policy, and then I really hope we can move to the audience.

Let me read from the Dale Russakoff and Bart Gellman profile in the Post. They write: "He moved at the margins on both central political battles of his day, the Reagan era military buildup, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, President Clinton's 1994 health care reform battle, not in the trenches where legislative warhorses mortgaged souls, called in chits, and traded favors in search of 51 votes."

Could you talk--and obviously Marcia will want to get in on this--that he's now making health care a central issue in the campaign. Where was he when health care was a central issue in American politics back in '93 and '94?

MR. DURENBERGER: Well, just a couple observations. Number one, he's making health care an issue in this campaign because it is an issue with the American people. Regardless of how you poll it, it has been an issue for a long time, it will continue to be an issue, and it deserves more attention than we apparently have been able to give it on the congressional side, where you're voting up and down on somebody's proposal.

I think Bill, in this case, welcomes the opportunity that an election and a debate on the Democratic side, because Republicans can't debate this issue, they can't win on health care so they put up MSAs and forget about it.

So at least we're getting, on a very, very important issue to the American people, we're getting a discussion of the issue.

Where was Bill? He was on the Senate Finance Committee, so he participated. But was this his area of expertise, when he's surrounded by Dole and Packwood and Durenberger and Heinz, and a group of people on his side? Originally, Russell Long, who was the expert on health policy.

No. He didn't choose to make this his issue. But on the first Bradley-Gore debate up in New Hampshire, in Dartmouth, I happened to be in Manchester at the time, and I'm on the telephone with my wife who happened to be on the staff of the Finance Committee at that particular time, and he got the question about Alzheimer's, and she said to me, on the phone--she's back in Minnesota listening to this, she's on the phone--she says, "I know how he's going to answer that one. He's going to talk about respite care," because that's what he worked on for a whole year, was bringing respite care in for people with serious dementia.

But I think his interest in the subject, on one hand, goes to some specific involvement. I'll give you the respite care as an example. Home health. There's a variety of other things you'd talked about--drugs, and so forth.

But the bigger issue for him is that the country goes bankrupt, that sometimes we don't deal with the problem, individuals are increasingly without access to the system unless we change the way we sort of Medicaid-ise access for low income, and so forth, and I think, to him, that's a very serious issue, regardless of what specialty or special interest he may have brought to it earlier.

MR. BROOKS: Let me ask a follow-up on that, asking about the innovative nature of the plan he has before us. I work for a conservative magazine. Sometimes, you can go two or three whole pages before reading a puff piece about a Democrat in the pages of The Weekly Standard. But we ran a piece, recently, called "A Surprisingly Good Health Care Plan," about the Bradley plan.

I saw Matt Miller, who was in the Clinton OMB, in the beginning, had a column in the LA Times, saying it reminded him of the George Bush, the elder, '92 health care plan.

I was wondering, is the Bradley plan a surprising plan? Is it, in your view, a realistic plan? Basically, what do you think of it?

MR. DURENBERGER: I'll keep this very, very short. I mean, the idea that Medicare and Medicaid are basically income security programs, are not health programs, is not a new idea. It's just that nobody's talked this way in a long time. The question is: How are going to financially support people's choices, either of physicians, or of health plans, and so forth? And the Tax Code is one way to do that. Direct grants through Medicare/Medicaid is another way to do that.

But what he has done here is exactly what George Bush did in January of '92, but never understood, so he didn't explain it to us, and that is, he said we ought to get rid of the welfare aspects, i.e., the Medicaid program, and use an income-related tax subsidy for low-income people, which is what Bill Thomas and some of the people on the Senate side are talking about now in the concept of premium subsidy.

So that is important to debate. The problem of the earned income tax credit, which you know gets in the way of that, is something that only the inside-the-Beltway folks can talk about.

The other side of it is he devolves the long-term care stuff to the States, and that's a very impractical solution because access to care in your aging, or your disability, should not depend on what state you live in.

This is a national problem, and I would disagree with him on that, but at least he's got the issue out there.

MS. ARONOFF: The only thing I'd comment on is that what I think is frequently missed about it--well, a couple of things. One is that Bill starts from the premise that this is the time to deal with health care and that there's a real opportunity to do something about it.

He does not give a voucher to people and send them out into the world to go buy a policy.

There is a benefit board that will establish benefits, and packages will be written to them, and the cost is basically an average cost of a premium weighted against those who are going to be receiving a subsidy. But his basic premise is that every American ought to have access to affordable quality health care, and the Government ought to do what it can do best, which is to provide the support for people whose incomes require support and help, and that the private sector ought to do what it does best, which is to insure people, and that you use the force of competition to help drive down the cost.

But that you protect those people who have need of care, and cannot afford it by providing them with a basic package of benefits, that will allow them to be able to have decent health care.

It's not a terribly complex notion. I would at least offer, and I think that your comment suggests that, that it has drawn support from a very broad group of people, from people who are running community health centers and understand that the Medicaid program may have benefits, but if you don't have doctors who are prepared to participate in the program, it doesn't do you a whole lot of good, to groups of people who are primarily concerned about the uninsured, as well as at least grudging acceptance from many of the providers of care that were involved in deep-sixing the Clinton-Gore proposal.

think that it presents an opportunity to build a coalition to get something done on a very broad basis that will give people security and access to care, and not worry about whether or not it is connected to their job. That it will give them the opportunity to get something better.

But it is also an opportunity to build a very broad consensus. The other thing that I think is notable about it is that it was not conceived in a backroom, handed down from on high and said, "This is it, take it or leave it."

He's put it out as a proposal, not as a piece of legislation, saying, "Here are the principles that are guiding me." We've had meetings with groups of people all over the country about it, to try and solicit their ideas, and no doubt, if he is President, it will be refined, it will have input from Congress, it will be shaped in an iterative process, but, in the process, building a coalition to make it happen.

I think Congressman Miller's, certainly, experience in that whole regard is probably pretty typical of that approach.

MR. DIONNE: What I'd like to do is start getting to the audience and I wanted to ask a question on foreign policy. I'm going to throw out a thought and I'd like Norm to pick up from there.

That Senator Bradley gave a foreign policy speech that took a lot of criticism, it was widely reported in the press that he kind a winged it, or backed away from a serious speech. I suspect Ms. Aronoff will have some dissent from that.

What I'd like to know is: Do we have any sense of the way he goes about thinking on foreign policy, and, Norm, if you could take it from there.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Sure, E.J. You know, we have a broad picture, I think emerging, in a larger sense, of Bradley as a senator, that really hits at this issue. It is somebody who, when he got engaged in an issue, got engaged at a level much deeper than you would find from the average senator, a level almost deeper than you'd find often from staff members.

There were an awful lot of issues, and there were some issues in which he got deeply engaged, like Third World debt, where the engagement was not at a level of legislating, but trying to raise the issue to the larger national agenda.

And then there were issues like tax reform or the water projects, water bill, where he got very much involved in the details of legislating, including to the level of trying to build coalitions, although a tax reform much more in the House than in the Senate itself. Then there were a whole range of other issues, including some very important ones, including tax reform in 1994, where there wasn't much engagement at all. In fact you might argue less engagement than the average senator who tries to cover the waterfront would normally have.

If he wasn't deeply interested, even on issues in the committee, he would let them slide. When it comes to foreign policy, you have to ask yourself, first, where you've got to get engaged in the widest range of issues, do you have a larger sense, will you keep that level of engagement up, and what can we learn from a Senate experience where we know we had two areas of considerable interest and engagement? Russia, fulfilling a long-standing interest, and the debt question, international financial issues.

We can also perhaps look at the critical vote that took place for almost everybody on foreign policy as we look to the future, the Gulf War vote, and what we know about his engagement there, and perhaps what lessons have been learned afterwards. What can we tell from his experiences in the Senate on these issues, or his lack of engagement on others, about how he would behave as a President on foreign policy?

MR. DIONNE: I guess you're on the hot seat again.

MS. ARONOFF: Okay. Bill took, as you correctly pointed out, a very deep interest in international economic issues. He was very active on all of the trade issues, served on a panel, was the only American and the only elected official on a panel to help devise the format that preceded the WTO.

And has taken a very active role on issues of U.S.-Japan relationships, establishing a U.S.-Japan legislators group that met annually in order to try and build long-standing relationships, and to come to understand that relationship better.

Russia. Eastern Europe. Mexico. I think those are all issues that he considers to be fundamentally important to U.S. security, and U.S. economic well-being. I think you would see him becoming involved in those that he considered to be fundamentally important, relying on key appointees to carry the load on a lot of them, because it's not just the President alone, and I think that Bill understands that.

So I think that he would, at least based on my understanding and observation of him, be someone who understands the critical importance of the U.S. role in the world, and would be guided by playing an active role in providing at least the framework and the guiding philosophy that drove U.S. policy.

I don't know, Norm, more than that, to be able to respond to your question. So maybe I'm missing a nuance in it.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Just take a couple of issues. Take the Russia issue where he was deeply engaged.

MS. ARONOFF: Right.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Was that brought, at any stage, to either a legislative or a policy level? Was it an engagement where he got involved himself, learned an awful lot, gave some speeches?

What did he do to operationalize, and what would he do to operationalize policy in this area?

And then, also, Marcia, talk a little bit about the Gulf war.

MS. ARONOFF: Sure.

MR. ORNSTEIN: The big issue: How involved did he get? He voted against involvement in the Gulf War. What lessons can you draw from that now, or what would he say now?

MS. ARONOFF: With respect to Russia, I mean, I think that he understood and articulated from the beginning that this was not an issue of personalities, and argued that the administration was too wrapped up in the personality of defending Yeltsin and not understanding the kinds of economic reforms and the impact on Russia, and what role we ought to be playing in terms of supporting reforms, but not banking everything on defending the personality of the leader.

With respect to the Gulf War, he felt that sanctions should have been given a further opportunity to work, as did, I'd say, the bulk of the Democratic members of the Senate, and the House as well. I would note that we still have many of the same problems that we had before the war there.

So I'm not sure whether or not leaving sanctions in place would have provided us with a better solution.

Clearly, it wasn't the one that was taken, and he made the call as he saw it at the time.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let me ask just one other question, Marcia. In the first debate, I believe it was, where Senator Bradley was talking about leadership models, he mentioned both Woodrow Wilson and Mikhail Gorbachev.

I wonder if--

MS. ARONOFF: For particular qualities.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Okay. Which qualities? We have Woodrow Wilson who was involved in--

MS. ARONOFF: Was the ability--

MR. ORNSTEIN: --the First World War, and then there was the treaty of Versailles--

MS. ARONOFF: If you recall the comments that he made, he said he admired Wilson for his ability to be able to see around the corner, to be able to anticipate changes in the world, and that he admired Gorbachev for being willing to risk change and to understand that change was necessary, and to be able to give up a hold on the accepted wisdom for a future that wasn't certain, and to provide some leadership.

I don't think he was saying that he wanted to emulate all of the qualities of any of the people that he mentioned, but was trying to point to particular characteristics that he admired.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you, Norm.

MR. BROOKS: It seems that none of the foreign policy issues he was drawn to were necessarily or primarily military issues, and I think he's alone among the leading presidential candidates, in not calling for an increase in defense spending. His foreign policy sentiments seem to be less interventionist than the Clinton administration and I wonder if somebody could talk to the issue of how he views military might and how he would view Bosnia, Kosovo type situations.

Maybe to pick someone, I'll pick Senator Durenberger, who sat on Intelligence, sat with him during the contra controversy, which he opposed, opposed, then supported, and opposed again.

What was the nature of his thinking, or the Bradley doctrine on when to use the military abroad?

MR. DURENBERGER: That's not one I dare touch. I mean, that is much too complicated and be reflected in--on his approach to appropriations issues and a variety of other things like that.

The challenge that I admired him taking on in that critical period in '85, '86, which was--as you recall '85 was the year of the spy, and I think it was ten Americans were caught spying in one way or another on their own country, and '86 was the year of the contras, and all the rest of that sort of thing.

The challenge here was one of trust. Foreign policy at that time was divided--or the foreign policy design and implementation was divided between the overt and the covert, and congressional oversight was hard to come by because the oversight on the overt side is the Foreign Relations Committee. On the covert side it's the Intelligence Committee, and nobody, including Bill Bradley, Dave Durenberger, and a lot of other people, was sure whether the then-President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, knew the distinction, was able to implement it in terms of his relationships with George Shultz or his relationship with Cap Weinberger, or his relationship with Bill Casey.

When you have that kind of a doubt, it's sort of hard to know how to react to what the New York Times or the Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal has to say about what's going on in a part of the world that no one has told you about.

So the challenge that I particularly appreciated Bill's support on was how do we hold a President and ourselves to account for whatever policy we choose, and however we go about doing that. Whether the President leads, we follow, or whatever the case may be.

How do we hold each other to account? And that's one we had to deal with, repeatedly, during that point in time.

So that does not answer the issue of when to use, how much investment, and what kind of military force. It does reflect that we don't invest in appropriate means of intelligence of any kind, and we don't use it appropriately in making policy.

MR. DIONNE: I want to call on Alan Murray because he's going to have to leave a little early. Then Congressman Miller. Then John Anderson in the audience.

Alan.

MR. MURRAY: You may want to come back to the subject. Can I change, quickly, to an economic issue, because as we've been sitting here this morning, the White House has announced--if my sources are right on this--the White House has announced that it's going to reappoint Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

MR.BROOKS: The market is up 3,000 points.

[Laughter.]

MR. MURRAY: At least. Yeah; call your broker.

MR. DIONNE: More Gucci loafers.

MR. MURRAY: And, Marcia, I've never understood A, if Senator Bradley has a problem with Alan Greenspan. If he does, B, what is it?

I mean, he voted against confirmation, I believe.

MS. ARONOFF: The first time.

MR. MURRAY: The first time, and he has resisted--

MS. ARONOFF: Because he had no international experience.

MR. MURRAY: He has resisted, on the campaign trail, he has resisted the temptation that every other candidate has succumbed to, I believe, of saying that they would reappoint him, and he has resisted that.

MS. ARONOFF: I think that's primarily an issue of not committing himself to any particular appointment.

MR. MURRAY: In advance.

MS. ARONOFF: Yes. I mean, he has certainly no problem with Greenspan. He voted for--

MR. MURRAY: There's no principled sort of economic disagreement there.

MS. ARONOFF: No; no.

MR. DIONNE: George Miller?

MR. MILLER: Yes. On the question of the military expenditures, speaking as a supporter, I think what I'm encouraged by in the foreign policy speech is sort of segmenting some of our responsibilities, and which are real, which can be handled by others, which are a matter of vital national interest, if you will; which have been made to appear to be a matter of national vital interest and may in fact not turn out to be, or have not turned out to be that case.

And with respect to the military budget, I don't think anybody, certainly in the Congress, believes that the last round of military expenditures has been terribly well-reasoned.

They started out for one purpose but by the time you got to the conference report, they were traded in for other purposes, because it really became about protecting projects; it wasn't about readiness. When it got down to it, it was initially put in in the name of our poor soldiers on food stamps. They're still on food stamps and everybody else has their projects.

So I think his willingness not just to jump on to that. I think, clearly, the current administration, because of the President's history in Vietnam, has been unwilling to challenge any of these assumptions.

Most people, I don't believe, still believe that the Aspin "bottom-up review" really is valid today, that it's a hangover.

So the notion of being out on the campaign stump and just saying, yeah, I'm for more military spending, I think shows a certain lack of discretion and understanding of what the Congress has been doing in the name of military spending and national security, and it hasn't been about national security. It's been about a lot of local politics, in terms of the expenditure of those dollars.

So I think people ought to welcome, that you just don't rush to get an issue off of the table by saying, well, we're for more national security, because the reality of the budget process is that that's not how that spending ends up.

MS. ARONOFF: I was just going to make one quick point, if I might, as an example.

As you may recall, in the late '70s, the energy crisis and the immediate response of the Carter administration, and subsequently of creating the Synfuels Corporation and a variety of other means, and the response that we needed, that energy security meant no foreign oil in the United States, and Bill, together with "Scoop" Jackson, spent a great deal of time trying to talk about what the real energy security issues were, and there was the fact that we were so dependent upon sources of oil from a single source, meaning from OPEC, and that we had no diversity of supply, and that we had no strategic petroleum reserve in order to cushion the economy from a supply cutoff.

And Carter, at the time, said that we couldn't fill the strategic petroleum reserve because OPEC would cut off oil supplies, and Bill went to Saudi Arabia, and met with Sheikh Yamani, and told him that together with Senator Jackson and Senator Dole, they were going to fill the reserve, and Yamani said if you do, we'll cut off supplies, and they came back, and in fact enacted an amendment to start filling the strategic petroleum reserve and supplies weren't cut off.

In fact they increased. But I think that it speaks to Bill's trying to understand what the real strategic issues are, and trying to act on them in a way that addresses them, and not how a problem is commonly perceived, or may be already defined in the public's mind, and a willingness to try and deal with the fundamental problems, and I think that's the way he's approached most everything.

MR. DIONNE: We know that Marcia Aronoff is a shrewd politician. She saw Ben Wattenberg's hand go up and mentioned "Scoop" Jackson.

John Anderson and then Ben Wattenberg.

MR. ANDERSON: A large part of a President's job is dealing with sudden emergencies that nobody had thought about.

I wonder if the panel could tell us what there is in the record, that would give us some indication of Mr. Bradley's ability to deal with crises. This isn't a substantive foreign policy question. It's simply what does he do when he doesn't have time to staff out an issue, he has to make a decision quickly?

MR. GOODMAN: Hasn't Bill Bradley's sort of style been to always look down at whoever was President as intellectually inferior to him, and to give out the impression that even if he's right, that, somehow, if Bradley were there, he would do it differently and better? And that sort of washes over a lot of area, but I think it's pretty consistent with Bill Bradley.

MR. : It's sort of the nature of the Congress--

[Simultaneous conversation and laughter.]

MR. GOODMAN: For like an instant response, you would have to go--the best illustration of Bradley was Rodney King, going to the Senate floor and denouncing that beating. That was not really characteristic of how he responds, I don't think, but he did it that time.

MR. ROSTENKOWSKI: Isn't what we're discussing here style? I've been out of D.C., now, for a couple of years, and in that short time, the manner in which we're governed has changed, enormously. Since Gingrich took over the responsibility of the speakership, I mean, members of a committee are not important anymore. The chairmen have surrendered their authority because they don't want to make decisions. I mean, thank God I wasn't there. I would have begun the revolution. The one thing that I admired about Speakers like Tom Foley, and Tip O'Neill, and Jim Wright--not as much Jim Wright, but the other two--they relied on chairmen to deliver.

And what a chairman's job was was to reflect the position of the leadership and also reflect to the leadership the position of his membership.

Today, I'd be ashamed to take a paycheck, if I was an ordinary congressman, because they aren't doing anything anymore.

I mean, they're sitting, relinquishing their authority to the chairmen--or to the leadership. You can't go to the experts--and I'm not talking exclusively about members, I'm talking about the staff that have been there, that know the nuances of the legislation. You're not getting that expert anymore. You're seeing the press release and the press conference on the doorstep of the White House or in the Speaker's Office.

That, to me, is just a surrendering of all the authority that you bring to Washington as a representative. So is Bradley going to be good enough, as President of the United States, to work with those people on the Hill? Gore has an advantage. He's been here. He's worked hard. He's on a first-name basis with a lotof people.

So when you compare Bradley's style and Gore's style, you have to be concerned with whether or not--and I admire Bill for this. I mean, he's a detail guy, and he's knowledgeable. But is he going to be able to compromise? And that's what it's all about--compromising so that you're working legislation through the process.

MR. MILLER: I think that, you know, you and Alan were talking about the fact that in the last minute, when things were going to fall on the floor, he came up with a compromise, the bubble, to make the thing work. In the last minute, when the water reform was going to fall on the floor in the United States Senate, he came up with the idea that he would drop out the reforms, given the word of Bennett Johnston, the bill would pass the Senate, we'd go to conference and it would pass, and it was done.

I mean, you know, in piece of legislation after legislation, you either see the vision, or you see the ability to work the system to get results.

I don't quite get what the argument or the premise is here, because in fact you're talking about, in some of the more difficult, complex issues, certainly in the domestic agenda, he has played that role and he's been willing, not to just play the Queen Bee role, not just willing to play the staffer role, not just willing to play the senator from New Jersey role.

In fact he's been able to move throughout and play roles where it was necessary. It sounds like teamwork, a little bit. You start to get the picture? And so I don't know if this is a criticism. The idea that he would react quickly without staffing something out, I don't know that's the President of the United States I want.

You know, there are a lot of ways to staff it. I think you're looking at a candidate, now, who calls upon his Senate experience, and his sabbatical from public office, and his California experience, where he spent a lot of time with people in the technology field, people in the entrepreneurial field, watching people staff out real-time immediate problems, and have to draw upon what other people have done to get the result, because if you try to reinvent it yourself--it's interesting--but the health care plan is an evolution.

We saw somebody try to reinvent American health care system and it was a major, major political setback.

So I think that here's a person who recognizes intelligence--you know--and is able to call upon that, and I think the time that he spent in the Silicon Valley--and when I'm talking to people who were talking to him during his residency there, make it pretty clear that there's an appreciation here of a time frame that Washington doesn't appreciate, and the kinds of solutions that Washington doesn't fully appreciate.

It's rather interesting, that the biggest criticism is he left Washington. Whew! You know, my God! But he went out and acquired some knowledge about the country, and about the dynamics that build upon a base. Again, the question of why isn't he really integrally involved in the military budget. Maybe there's a recognition that economic power, and the dynamics of the economic system will have about as much to say about American national security as a new tank or the F-22.

Again, maybe its about being a little bit ahead of the curve, and whether or not you staff it the way we do in Washington, or you respect these old jurisdictions--they're interesting, but they don't always respond to the needs of the American people, and so there's a freshness here, that I think, obviously, you know, the question on Silicon Valley, is is the audience listening? I think the audience is listening and I think he has the right message.

MR. GOODMAN: I don't think anybody blames him, now, for leaving Washington. I don't think--only people in Washington complain about that.

MR. MILLER: Well, that's what I'm saying. You know, you can sit in this room, and people, most of the people [inaudible].

MR. GOODMAN: This is Interior business here.

MR. BROOKS: Why don't we go to Ben.

MR. WATTENBERG: I have two very brief questions, one for the panel, which is the political press has pretty well described Senator Bradley as being a senator sort of from the eclectic center, who is now running either to the left, or from the left, attacking Gore--or positioning himself in a different way than Vice President Gore is, and I wonder if you think that idea, that he went from the center to the left, for political purposes, is correct.

And, secondly, for the chairman, you said that you thought the debate was highly enlightening, between Bradley and Gore, and yet what Gore has been doing is attacking Bradley as a quitter, as abandoning blacks and Latinos on Medicaid, as sticking them with a $150 voucher, as going through public school by--with vouchers, to gut the public schools, and being a lackey of the drug companies, which does not seem to me to be highly enlightened, and I wondered--

MR. ROSTENKOWSKI: Well, I would compare the debate that the two Democrats had with the Republican challenge, and as far as I'm concerned you're getting a lot more from the Democrat colloquies than you are from the Republicans.

I don't think that Gore's tactics are correct in this. I think that you've got the Stephen Douglas/Abraham Lincoln syndrome here. You've got Bill Bradley standing, becoming very astute and very soft-spoken, and delivering a message, and Gore is in--and charging.

I think that when the level is about issues, it's better for the American people, than it is about personality.

MR. DIONNE: Could we go to Tom Mann next, and then I'm trying to figure out how close do we have to stay to time. Can we go on a little bit?

Tom.

MR. MANN: A key feature of governance is how a new President structures his White House and fills those key roles. One of the biggest puzzles that many of us have about a Bradley presidency is what that White House and administration, more generally, would look like. Who the trusted advisors and aides would be. Who the NSC advisor is, and who's at the core of the National Security team? Who's the economic team? Who's likely to be the White House chief of staff?

When asked the question about who advised you on education, Senator Bradley sort of put that within the zone of privacy. Maybe that's not accurate. But the question becomes why do we know so little about--other than George and Marsha, and a few others, about who the senator turns to for advice, and who would likely fill those key positions? And maybe you could inform us today, that there really are such people, and that helps, I think, the citizenry, get an idea of how Bill Bradley would govern.

MR. MILLER: Should we give up the vice presidency selection, too?

[Laughter.]

MR. : That was you, right? Your--

MR. : I just wanted to know how much disclosure you wanted.

MR. BROOKS: Somebody from a big state, maybe, in the West.

MR. MILLER: It's a great way to start a fight in the campaign, is to decide who's going to be the chief of staff, now. I know Marsha can comment but I'm--

MS. ARONOFF: No, I think that Bill has always reached our extraordinarily broadly and has been able to tap resources from over the country, in Government, from private sector, from the nonprofit world. I'm not going to get into, today, as George indicated, indicating who's going to be sitting in various different positions in the White House, or in any agency of Government, I think that he has tapped terrific people in the past, he's got a great group of